Nouns
There is no inflectional morphology involved with nouns anywhere. Nouns have one form only and don't inflect for case, gender or number. There are no definite or indefinite articles. Case Grammatical case is expressed by word order, logic and a topic marker when necessary. In unmarked word order, the subject precedes the verb: uma janzu mother cook mother is cooking Direct objects follow the verb: uma janzu lanki mother cook rice mother is cooking rice Indirect objects can either follow or precede the direct object: uma janzu lanki wa mother cook rice i mother is cooking rice for me uma janzu wa lanki mother cook i rice mother is cooking rice for me There is no separate marking for indirect objects. The difference between direct and indirect objects is left to logic and context: yu pau wa apa he give i money he gave me money *he gave me to the money When one of the constituents is topicalized and moved to the front of the sentence thus breaking the basic unmarked SVO-order, there is the option to mark this constituent with the markerbe which is placed directly after it: lanki be uma janzu rice top mother cook it is rice mother cooked *the rice cooked mother apa be yu pau wa money top he give i it was money he gave to me *the money gave him to me Gender There is no overt distinction between nouns with an intrinsic masculine or feminine load: uba - father uma - mother wana - woman bua - brother The roots bu for "man" and wana for "woman" are used to make new words with this load in order to indicate the sex of a being when necessary: ume - sheep bume - ram waname - ewe These roots usually are prefixed, but sometimes they occur at the end of words too: uva - spouse vabu - husband vawana - wife Number Number and definiteness is derived from the context or expressed with quantifiers or deictic markers: nia car the/a car/cars nia wi car many many cars nia sun car two two cars nia yo car all all cars/every car Collective Collective nouns are characterized by the ending in the root nyo meaning "collection, many of". Please keep in mind this is a closed class and not a suffix which can actively be applied to nouns in order to pluralize them. Examples of words containing this root are: unyo - people, ethnic grouping Majaranyo - the Hungarian people penyo - forest jinyo - band Some words without this root nyo have an intrinsic collective meaning and are a mass noun on their own: aso - water shum - grains apa - money Also note substances like elements in general have no separate collective form altough in many instances they do express mass nouns: vungu - gold ninia - helium kwengu - silk fangu - iron Mass nouns too can be modified by quantifiers or other nouns in order to denote a more specific amount: binso yem - three (glasses of) beer seo na aso - a cup of water simbe chu vungu - a piece of gold